Another royal prisoner, partly contemporaneous with King James, and not less illustrious in history, was Charles, Duke of Orleans. Richard II, as we have seen, married for his second wife Isabel of Valois, daughter of King Charles VI. of France. After his death she married Charles, Duke of Orleans, whose clever, reprobate father Louis, brother of Charles VI, had been assassinated by order of the Duke of Burgundy. The two young people were therefore first cousins. When Louis had laid claim to the French throne, our Henry IV made a counterclaim, and thus there was fierce rivalry between the two men, and Louis took every opportunity of sending insulting messages to “the usurping Duke of Lancaster,” and married his son Charles to the young widowed Queen, when Hal, the madcap Prince of Wales, was eagerly wooing her. The hapless young wife died in childbirth in 1409, her husband being only nineteen years old. He bewailed his loss in some very beautiful verses. The little child lived to become Duchess of Alençon. Reasons of State induced Charles to marry again, his wife being Bona, daughter of the Count of Armagnac, who bore him no offspring. In 1415 came the memorable invasion of France and the great English victory at Agincourt. Charles, with his brothers and other members of the French royal family, had done their best in defence of their rights. Shakespeare depicts his zeal and his hatred of the invader in his flying utterances. The brave fellow fell among the wounded, and was found by the victor bleeding and speechless on the field. He made much of him, brought him to England, and sent him to the White Tower, fixing a ransom of 300,000 crowns on his head. He was now twenty-four years old, and Henry was anxious that the ransom should not be forthcoming. For he now married Isabel’s youngest sister, Catherine of Valois, and it was most important in his estimate that Charles should have no children to dispute the rights of those of his wife. It was part of the treaty into which he entered that he should succeed to the French throne, and a son of Charles of Orleans would be a most formidable rival. The result was that the latter remained a prisoner in England for five and twenty years.